Wednesday 4 November 2009 05.50 EST
First published on Wednesday 4 November 2009 05.50 EST

It’s a discovery to appall a modern-day Captain Cook. A vast plastic
terra incognita, composed of the detritus of our civilisation, has formed an area the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. And feeding on this submerged stratum of bottle caps and beer-can loops is one of the most beautiful birds in creation

This summer, Chris Jordan photographed albatross chicks on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific. Contrary to received opinion, what has been dubbed “the Pacific garbage patch” is not a vast floating raft of rubbish, he says

“The actual scenario is even more insidious. The plastic is all underwater, suspended invisibly below the surface, and breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces. Much of it has already broken down into tiny fragments about the same size as plankton, being ingested by the hundreds of billions into the small fish that are the bottom of the food chain for all marine life. One of the reasons I went to Midway is because the plastic surfaces there in this bizarre way"

“The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food. Every year, tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.” He stresses that in taking these photographs, “not a single piece of plastic was moved"

My imperially inflected 1931 British Encyclopaedia declares the albatross to be “exceedingly voracious, whenever food is abundant, gorging to such a degree as to be unable to fly or swim”. But this is a harsh retribution for such gluttony. Rather, their terrible fate is the result of an unhappy conspiracy of natural and human forces

The North Pacific gyre moves clockwise as vast volumes of air are heated at the equator and rise into the atmosphere. This airy cycle stirs the sea below, sweeping into its calm centre – like the eye of a hurricane – the plastic waste of nations that discharge or drop their rubbish into the Pacific

Sailors once believed, pace Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, that the death of an albatross was an ill omen, as the perennially wandering bird carries the souls of the dead. Perhaps we ought to have Jordan’s modern memento mori hung about our collective necks, as an indictment of our notional but illusory dominion